I looked at the number of blogs I have on my website, and it's 411 posts. That's 7.9 years' worth of weekly posts. At one point, there was more. I started blogging in 2006. That's almost 18 years of content.
I cleaned out everything earlier than 1/1/2017 since I felt it was less relevant to today's business climate. I was chronicling the birth and rise of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, the iPhone, and WordPress while talking about the demise of MySpace, Blab, Google+, Vine, and various other smaller email and social media distribution platforms.
Recently, we have seen the rise of AI, and the explosion of tools is mind-blowing. You have search (answers) like ChatGPT, aggregators like Perplexity.ai, video editing like Runway, video segmenting like Vidyo, graphics creation like Midjourney and DALL-E, and so many more.
Even stall-worths like Adobe, Google, Vimeo, and WordPress are implementing AI-embedded tools. The options are changing and growing every day.
The Investment
Everyone loves FREE, but how free is free? Most programs offer fee-free versions as a trial or a basic version to hook you into their platform. If you want the latest cool stuff, you are enticed to subscribe to the platform (which you can cancel at any time). You can save 20% with an annual subscription, but they are OK with you paying monthly.
Whether it's $9.95 or $99.95 per month, that's minimal compared to the cost of set-up, learning, and optimization. It can take hours to days to set up, but it can take weeks to months to become proficient. Although some of that time is useful if you decide to switch platforms to the new cool kid in town, you still will certainly have an investment in time to get that new platform integrated into your business.
I could easily take my old blogs and ask AI to rewrite them to reflect today's business environment better. That would certainly be faster than my two-finger typing, re-working sections, and asking a VA to proof and post, but would it or could it be more successful or effective?
The Return On Investment
While in the long run, the time savings using AI to edit or segment video for you may outweigh the cost of getting up to speed, you see bright, shiny new objects everywhere that may entice you to try the new and supposedly better way.
AI can and will wow you with how fast it can do tasks that took you days or hours to perform. As the technology and the tools progress and improve, it will become even better at creating great content with and for you. That time saving is the main purpose at this point.
The real return on investment is about outcomes. Does this new or modified content create the desired outcomes? What outcome are you trying to achieve that has you wanting to create or modify content?
Ultimately, it would be more sales, but there are steps to making that happen. You have to make people aware of your products or services. You have to tell your story to get people to engage with your people. You have to build trust that you have their best interest in mind and will be there for the long haul.
Each of those are measurable, and your content may or may not be directly tied to more sales, but it should at least be part of a marketing ecosystem that does.
Profit and Loss
Business is simple. Basically, if you can make more money than you spend, you make a profit. That profit is left over after you pay all of your expenses. If your income is less than your expenses, then you need to have a bank account that you can withdraw from to help make up the difference.
Most businesses will ebb and flow between profit and deficit, and you sometimes have to cut expenses to offset a deficit of profits.
When it comes to marketing, outcomes are profits and content creation and distribution are part of the expense. As long as those outcomes lead to financial profits, marketing goes from being an expense to an investment.
Accountants can use creative accounting to help create a link between expenses and profits. We as marketers need to use creative marketing to help create a link between expenses and profits.
The PATH to Profits
Consumers tend to have an easier path to purchase (not that it's easy by any means to sell them). They go from Awareness to Store to Purchase. Getting them to repurchase is the hard part since we all have the attention span of a goldfish.
Businesses have a longer and more chartable P.A.T.H. to purchase. They go from Awareness to Engagement to Inquiry to Purchase. By chartable P.A.T.H., I mean there are data points you can track and measurably follow from send to sale.
People—The better you can target who your messages reach, the more you can control the tone and content of your messages to manage their mindset, motivation, and next moves.
Attract—If you know who you are talking to and what motivates them, you will have a better chance of getting their attention. This is especially true if they are in the process of searching for what you sell or are trying to review alternatives to what they already have.
Trace—The goal is to get them to interact with the content on your website. Although cookies are fading away for retargeting, cookies on your own website can be used once they interact with a form. Then, you can trace their journey within your ecosystem to see what interests them.
Harness—Once they self-identify (fill out a form) or purchase, you should have their email address, which allows you to communicate directly. They ultimately choose to stay engaged or unsubscribe, but if you have something of value to them, you can track the path to purchase. This takes Human-2-Human Interaction.
The key to this path is knowing who you are talking with, what interests them, piquing that interest into action, and engaging with them on a personal level.
By personal (especially in the B2b space), I mean that you should add them to your email list and try to connect with them on social media (LinkedIn for B2b business). They have control to decide to unsubscribe and/or choose to connect or not. If you can bring them into your ecosystem, you can track them with a CRM or other database, and actually create and track that path to profits.
Closing Thought
People think just creating AI content will lead people down a P.A.T.H. to profits, but I think it can be helpful but not purposeful. I use AI to ask questions, research concepts, and clarify my thoughts but never to write complete concepts.
Sure, my life would be so much easier to just plug in an old article into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it based on where we are today, but what would be missing the bridge from my knowledge of the audience, my experiences, and the knowledge of how I want to lead people forward.
I could learn to write prompts, create a personal AI model, and accept this new reality, but I believe that we are in the people business, not just the content creation and distribution business. My ultimate goal for myself and our clients is to get to a point where a person is having a personal conversation with another person.
Technology changes and people change, but trust is the only way to get people to change who they buy from, and that is the most Human-2-Human part of Business-2-Business.
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Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?
To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at The Bacon Podcast.